IIS7 URL Rewrite, WordPress, and Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access
Quite some time ago, I migrated my website to a Windows Server 2008 system with IIS7. Since my blog is based on WordPress, I was quite pleased when I discovered the IIS7 URL Rewrite module that allows me to create “pretty” URL paths instead of the usual date/time URL’s that WordPress normally uses.
Unfortunately, enabling these rules broke my Outlook Web Access with Exchange 2007. I was able to login to OWA without issue, but I’d constantly get “Access Denied” prompts when trying to navigate to folders, open emails, write emails, etc etc.
The problem ended up being that my URL Rewrite rule was incomplete. In order to make the URL Rewrite rule for WordPress coexist with OWA, I had to add an extra condition to the rule:
Basically, in addition to setting the default pattern as .* and your URL rewrite target as index.php, you also need 3 conditions. The first two are included in the documentation on the IIS.net site, however, the third one– {PATH_INFO} Does not match the pattern /owa/ — is the one required for OWA coexistence.
Hopefully this information will help others who may be running this similar configuration.